Worthing provided superb conditions over the weekend.. North easterly (Offshore) gusty but good winds (12 – 18 knots), pancake flat water and blue skies (on saturday).

Jonnie and I took to the water for a three hour training session, upwind and downwind, tacking and gybing. I now see just how much easier it is to sail on flat water. Hopefully our sailing on open water with swell and chop will prove to be an advantage over the next season.

Jonnie was eager to test out his brand new V8 North sail and his comments were…

“Very controllable power, Light feel, easy to set up differently. He noticed that the sail could be set to point high or increased power for downwind all very easily”

For us bigger guys this is a huge leap forward.

Anyway he was smiling all over the place and was extremely pleased with his investment.

I decided early on in the session that it would be a good idea to swap boats and see what the main differences were in set up and performance.

I was interested to see what Jonnie thought of all the work I put in to supermistress. The good news is he thought the boat was really stable and well set up. He was foil gybing all over the place on it which gave me a boost of confidence. He then set about making a few adjustments. The main thing was increasing the lift on the main foil. This made the gybing easier as the boat foils much more through the transition.

He also tightened up the steering dampener to make the boat less sensitive to input. Finally he recommended that I chop off a load of extra mainsheet which I must say was getting wrapped around my legs through every tack!

As for the Velociraptor, it was super smooth. Everything was the same but with less effort. The boat just constantly wants to be up on the foils with the smallest forward movement. Once up, it steams upwind with very little input too.

The biggest difference was in the rig. Being able to see my boat from a distance was very enlightening. I could see that the leach was open and spilling a lot of power. I think a new rig will be the way forward for racing. The other thing about the rig was that the foot is much lower on my MSL9 which makes gybing a little more tricky.

Still, overall it was good to see that the changing the foils, lowering the wings and updating the entire set up on the mistress had moved it on so much from the boat it was last year when I first bought her… sailing nose up, jumping out and unstable, it’s a wonder how Alex Adams managed to sail her so well all them years ago…